


the bones you made for me

by elektra



Series: balance of power [2]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Gore, Gen, Introspection, Thousand Year Blood War Arc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:33:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25496128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elektra/pseuds/elektra
Summary: Ulquiorra escapes his final battle against Ichigo, but he struggles to understand who he is and what to do with the pieces that have been left behind.
Relationships: Szayel Aporro Granz/Ulquiorra Cifer
Series: balance of power [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/577738
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19





	1. social substitutability

**Author's Note:**

> this is a rewriting of a previous fic i posted around 2016, "leviathan." i am reusing parts of it to create a new story and plot, which is why past readers may see familiar scenes.

Falling, falling, falling…

_Grow wings!_ Something primordial taunts Ulquiorra.

_I already had those,_ Ulquiorra thinks as he free falls through the darkness of Hueco Mundo. He can’t differentiate the waves his ashes make along the breeze from the glittering stars. How far away are those constellations, and who hung them there?

_You didn’t do a very good job of using them._

No, no he didn’t.

The sun catches on each particle of himself as he is washed back beneath the dome of Las Noches. Ulquiorra rematerializes with a violent smack onto the flat roof of a crumbled tower in a flurry of sand-coated feathers.

The suddenness of the moment has his lungs burning. His blood has smeared profusely beneath himself and is currently bubbling out faster than the stone can absorb each pulse from his open ended arteries. It’s true, that Ulquiorra’s body is a weapon, but right now it doesn’t know what to replace first; the blood, or the larger pieces that have been gouged out of him. Which is more important for battle? How can he choose which parts of himself to salvage?

Pain is an odd sensation, unfamiliar and stinging without mercy. He has never experienced it before and wonders if it’s possible to die from the feeling alone. Immediately, Ulquiorra can sense a completely missing left leg, and a left arm that hangs by a thread of muscle. The slow weaving of his body is agonizing.

Astride the slickness of his own gore, Ulquiorra slides helplessly off the roof with a soft groan, his small body even lighter with the absence of most of its parts. The tower has been broken in half, standing prone and lonely in the sand, so this fall is not as far as the first. Ulquiorra first bounces off the edge of a slab of concrete before coming to rest against its flat face. Debris lodges against his spine, but this discomfort is minuscule in comparison. Ulquiorra is uncomfortably reclined against the ruins of Las Noches, but… alive.

Somehow.

Ulquiorra had doubted the escape would even work, and perhaps it still has not. He’s failed his primary goal, regardless of what happens to him in the end. There is no one left to give him any laurels for a job half-done. If killing a boy a few times over only for him to defiantly rise up again even qualifies as success. Each death was a new leaf turned. Ulquiorra did nothing but doom Las Noches even more. He brought out new powers in Ichigo that may never have manifested if it wasn’t for his determination to dominate.

Ulquiorra looks long down his body once more, inspecting the damage more closely.

It’s not good.

Three of his fingers are missing from his right hand. One has snapped backward peculiarly at the middle knuckle and how flops listlessly by a precious few millimetres of skin. There is a deep hole nearly clean through his abdomen. Blood has begun to crust uncomfortably along his hairline, pulling his hair into mats, becoming mixed with sweat and drying into crackling layers.

This is… humiliating. But it’s what he deserves. He is a war dog who was chained to this city, it should come at no surprise that he is left to bleed out if he was unable to defend it. In the distance, Las Noches is being dissipated into smoke and rubble. The dome falls piece by piece into the sand, huge shards of thick glass impaling the limestone beneath. The end of the world as arrancar know it comes with eerie silence.

Ulquiorra utters a wet noise that catches on blood dribbling from his nostrils. He thinks it may have been a sigh, under different circumstances. Reality is becoming hazy as he straddles the line between awake and asleep, half aware of his surroundings but the thoughts belonging to another place, another mind that opens when this world is closed.

The last time he’d been so helpless, he’d pierced himself on the cool branches of the quartz bush. That came with no pain. It had been a welcoming embrace and the dark, swirling sky above never bored his wandering gaze. But now, it’s difficult to keep his eyes open. His sclera are parched and prickle with bent eyelashes poking beneath his eyelids. On the quartz bush, there was no difference between keeping his eyes open or closed. Now, closing his eyes hides a scene of chaos that cannot be escaped nor ignored.

He was born twice in emptiness. It follows that he should die in emptiness. But Ulquiorra can’t succumb to nothingness when before him there lays… everything.

_You have nothing left,_ that ancient voice taunts yet again.

_I still see everything._

_It’s all in pieces._

_So am I._

Reishi swarms in through the shattered dome from the rest of Hueco Mundo. Ulquiorra hasn’t felt that spiritual surge in some time. The thin air of Las Noches swells with millennia of ground up hollows, becoming entwined with his reconstructing body like a sturdy stitch. It speeds along the regeneration of his left leg, and soon he stretches the feeling back into his new limb. Though the pain is still there, he is able to breath deeply and evenly again. Las Noches was indeed a kind of prison, but he was the one who set both the foundation and the final brick.

If it meant anything, Ulquiorra would care that he can sense each falling arrancar being returned into the atmosphere as he lazes here uselessly. Maybe it does mean something, but for the ego and not the heart. He doesn’t care about any of them individually, but taken as a whole the arrancar were meant to represent something tangible about the supremacy of their being. And just as it means something that Ulquiorra opened the floodgates that allowed the destruction of the arrancar, it means something that Aizen is nowhere to be seen.

He must know. But he must not care.

Ulquiorra supposes that he can’t expect others to not behave in the same ways he does.

He isn’t sure how much time had passed by the time he fully comes to again. Regardless, it’s a small surprise that there’s no rabid hollow chewing on his entrails trying to resuscitate itself. It must have not been very long, judging by how mangled he still is, but his left arm which had been shorn clean off has now returned with only some stiffness remaining in the elbow. In Ulquiorra’s midsection is still a vicious wound — dark, foreboding, gelatinous in how it churns. Whatever priority his body gives in restoring itself, it seems an exposed intestine is not at the top of such list.

So be it. What is more alarming is the parts of Ulquiorra that have remained: Murciélago.

His right hand is black, leathery, and a layer of feathers sprout from wrist to elbow. The fingers have all been healed, but they are long, glinting claws. This seems to be the only such afflicted part of his body; the rest of his black feathers flutter into the creases of his tattered clothing, of which there is left only a streak of white fabric shrouding him. Ulquiorra doesn’t know where his zanpakutō has ended up. It doesn’t matter anyways, if Murciélago is still here, with him. It’s easier to ignore what he doesn’t know and can’t fathom.

Ulquiorra focuses the energy he has left into standing. For what purpose, he isn’t sure, but it’s something to be done, whether it be now or later. It’s the most challenging task next to living in itself. His blood has created an uneven, blotchy texture on the stone around him, letting him find something textured to catch his forearm onto and lift himself up. The fresh skin of his bare foot scuffs in the scrabble, tiny capillaries bursting into new ones, but that’s the least of Ulquiorra’s concern. A limb, what’s a limb, but the heavy weight of his guts feel ready to slosh out of his torso if he were to lean too far forward.

Breathe. Ulquiorra must remember how it is to function anew, to shed the old self. A deep breath in. Particles of souls, old and young alike, buzz in his lungs.

He looks up to the patchwork atmosphere that flickers between sunlight and night. He had originally broken the dome with the expectation there would be someone left to fix it, and a reason to stay beneath it. This city had been left in his custody, with the thought it would still be a city in the end. Szayel Aporro, if he is still alive, could fix it. For what purpose, Ulquiorra isn’t sure, it would be as useful as putting cloth over a leak.

The sky silently pries more incandescent chunks away from itself. Ulquiorra’s reiatsu clings to the shards like a gangrenous miasma. He has always been better at breaking things, anyways, especially the naïve hearts of little boys and girls who grapple with true power.

_You break them enough times and you have to pay for it. You gave them the power!_

Ulquiorra wants to shake this voice out of his head, like water trapped in his ears, but he knows there’s nothing there. Is it Murciélago?

_Bandages,_ his torn stomach whinges. His whole body seems to be speaking to him in one way or another. Szayel was more of a destroyer than a creator too, even on his best days, but he would have the supplies; Yammy had been sporting a fabric sling for his shoulder until recently. At the very least, it would keep Ulquiorra’s organs in the correct place.

For someone with a livelier disposition, trekking around Las Noches would come with no hesitation. Yet, what is Ulquiorra to do? The meek would tell him to crawl back into the dirt and weep until better fortune somehow arises, but nothing good ever comes of this place. What other fate would happen upon him if he withered pathetically on a mural of defeat?

At least Ichigo is under the impression he is dead. It may be enough to not attract any attention.

Ulquiorra limps upon the wreckage of Szayel’s laboratory, his footprints not leaving any trail as the wind filtering in through the gaping dome wipes the sand clean. The wretchedly loud wail he imagines Szayel giving at the sight of it makes his ears ring instinctively. All rubble and dust smeared on shattered gold tiles, the top of the laboratory caved in on itself. The ruination goes so deep in the middle that it pierces into the underground levels, exposing any secrets he connived beneath their feet.

Ulquiorra could use sonído to reach the bottom quickly, but not knowing the bottom and where exactly one ends up after moving so quickly would be unwise. Just as he found it better to struggle through the walk here, the speed of the descent alone might redecorate the rubble with his intestines. Ulquiorra has thought far too much about what lurks inside him. He squeezes a hand to his abdomen and finds that a stretchy, wet membrane has formed between it and a slowly recomposing sheet of muscle.

Good enough. Ulquiorra grips the edge of the hole in the laboratory floor, turns around, and slowly clambers down a few inches at a time by delicately maneuvering broken concrete and steel brackets. It’s easy, until it isn’t, and there is nothing beneath Ulquiorra’s foot on the next step. Unceremoniously, he allows himself to fall the last few metres, landing on his side with a sickening, dust-stirring crack on the floor. It very well may have broken his neck, but he twists his head from side to side and the blossom of pain is gone as soon as it sprung.

Opening his eyes again after impact proves interesting. Ulquiorra can see in the dark. Out of one eye, that is. His vision is scrambling between darkness on the left and grainy black and white captured by the minute light coming in from the hole he’d come down through, far above now. The result is disorienting as Ulquiorra struggles to stand up and dust himself off, much less navigate forward. His temples are pounding, but eventually he becomes accustomed to the stuttering image. It’d be best not to linger, then.

Smaller holes in the ceiling provide slim, dusty shafts of light that help guide Ulquiorra through dark hallways, mostly preserved this far down into Szayel’s keep. Whether it was some sort of generator in the laboratory or Aizen’s presence itself that kept the building lit, he didn’t know. If the rest of Las Noches is just as dark… another point towards divinity.

Ulquiorra knows where he is anyways, roughly. He’s spent an inordinate amount of time here.

Kurosaki Ichigo might have wept for a friend or lover’s defaced home and their presumed death, as his had also been wept for. What point, what purpose there would be to perpetuating the hopelessness of such a situation, a mystery. Ulquiorra isn’t a wallower nor a sentimentalist. Szayel had once been useful to Ulquiorra and Las Noches more broadly, and now Ulquiorra’s knowledge of both him and his laboratory continue to be useful.

The similarities in the concentrations of humanity within Ulquiorra and Ichigo (and even Szayel, in the right doses) end in the layout of their veins.

Veins that are currently still frothing with blood.

The loss is not the most alarming part. He can remake the blood as quickly as he expels it, but he doesn’t know how soon he’ll have to move quicker than a hobble. He doesn’t know what is lurking past the laboratory, or even what’s in the next room he approaches.

The hallway stops at this door, closed behind a small screen attached to the wall.

_Don’t have a bright idea and cut off my hand,_ Szayel had admonished him one day as he watched it open when Szayel placed his hand on the screen. Perhaps Ulquiorra should have.

No matter. A door is a door. He’s battled more difficult things.

Ulquiorra steps back and angles himself to the side before he kicks the screen off the wall, and it lands on the floor in a gaggle of wires and frenzied beeps. The door pops out of its lock enough for him to wiggle his fingers into the gap and pull it open. Ulquiorra steps into a familiar, brightly-lit operating theatre — the smaller of the two here, but good enough. He rips open every drawer in order until he finds a roll of white bandage and tiny surgical scissors.

The ragged piece of cloth covering his stomach peels away with a slick sound, white little threads caught in the tangle of gnarled flesh. Ulquiorra breathes deeply in, and out, and jams the tips of the scissors into the wound, cutting at the layer of muscle and membrane that had grown. A torrent of blood splatters onto the floor, staining his feet and legs. He braces himself on the counter and breathes through it until he can feel emptier, no hemorrhaging sloshing around inside his torso. His body will take care of the rest, given this bit of assistance.

Agonizingly, but quickly, Ulquiorra wraps the bandage around his torso several times to create a base layer. Then he measures and rips more strips on top, a task made lighter by his sharp claws. He ties the last piece tightly. It’s a little stiff and constricting, but better than leaving a trail of organs strewn across Las Noches like a map.

Part of Ulquiorra wonders why he’s going through all this trouble.

_You can do anything you want,_ the other part says.

But he never has. He never has wanted.

_It’s a curse._

It’s a blessing. It’s easy to avoid oneself when you give no voice to it.

The dark, feathered hand trembles.

Ulquiorra’s posture is straighter from the pressure of the bandages, his spine shifting and rolling like tectonic plates beneath his rippling skin. Hurtling from the sky at an obscene acceleration with have its consequences.

There is a closet in the corner of the preparatory room attached to the theatre, hidden as a panel in the wall. He’d seen Szayel take and hang up his coats and capes there. At this point Ulquiorra would wear anything, no matter how large Szayel’s clothing would be. But at the end of the railing hangs a single spare outfit from Ulquiorra’s own room. He didn’t know Szayel had taken it, nor why, but he slips on the plain white top and matching pants, loose at the waist and tapered at the calf. Not an appropriate uniform, something to wear in private, but better than a tattered robe. Lastly, Ulquiorra pulls on a pair of boots.

He would appreciate running water to scrub the gore from himself, even a damp towel, but testing the nearby sink produces nothing but a high pitched hiss.

And so, now what?

The theatre would reconnect Ulquiorra to a maze of tunnels and hallways, and somewhere in there to the rest of Las Noches. What he would hope to accomplish anywhere else, besides sit and decay that is, can be decided upon arrival.

Fine then. He wastes no time to scour the room. Snooping doesn’t interest him. Not here, at least. Any secrets Szayel thought he had are already known, don’t matter, or benefit anyone very little at this point.

The surrounding hallways are dark, and the motion-activated lights flicker sporadically even though there is nothing but unclean, dusty air moving through them. When Ulquiorra walks into an atrium with four forking paths, something scampers around the corner to the right. The cracked fluorescent lights follow it only a second too late, so he goes to investigate.

One of Szayel’s fracción scrapes its feeble, stumpy hands against the dead end wall. The round thing bounces into the concrete uselessly as it cries for its master, “Szayel Aporro! Szayel Aporro! Szayel Aporro!”

This is not interesting to watch. It borders on pathetic; a character flaw of Szayel’s that he wouldbe so paranoid and egotistical to not bestow his perfection on the things that could save him. At least give it the brains to be able to navigate its own home.

Ulquiorra walks away. The fracción desperately wanders the atrium, _Szayel-Aporro, Szayel Aporro!,_ but its cries soon stop. Maybe it found a way out, or it dashed itself bloody and dead.

The path he takes leads him out into a viewing gallery above a long hall, the floor of which has been completely torn up. Wisps of reiatsu linger on the jagged tile, shinigami and hollow alike, but the battle had been taken somewhere else. Ulquiorra steps off the edge of the platform and drops to the shattered ground below, accepting the force of the fall into his bent knees.

The laboratory is here, behind two tall open metal doors. Left open, or opened by someone else? Not seeing or hearing anyone near the entrance, Ulquiorra chances walking in. The laboratory is built in a rotunda, as the glass dome on the surface of Las Noches would suggest. Thick glass doors cut it into different sections and stations. In the centre is a machinery core, dangling cables as thick as Ulquiorra’s forearm and screens with inward-facing chairs.

He absentmindedly runs a claw along the spread of keyboards, _clack clack clack clack_ as he passes a microscope. _Everything is comprised of smaller things, building blocks of the universe we cannot see until enough of them come together,_ Szayel had once explained as he pressed the lens into his glasses. Indeed, he and Ulquiorra, and their respective corpses, were the small pieces of a ladder meant for a god. No one could see them now.

_Clack clack clack clack,_ Ulquiorra continues along his path, his eyes darting left to right in search of something useful.

_Clack clack_ **_clunk_** _._

Ulquiorra didn’t make that noise.

A breakneck reaction: he swivels a chair out of the central console so that the backrest shields him as he squats behind it. Not much of a shield, if it could splinter into him and his vulnerable torso.

If he has any luck left, it will be another fracción revelling in its despair.

Silence.

He holds his breath and peeks around the chair, gripping its thin edge to keep it in place.

There is something wrong with his senses, his perception — he can’t sense any reiatsu around the bend of the laboratory. Not that there is no presence at all and he is in fact alone, but his pesquisa echoes back into himself. Hit his head too hard.

_Hit it a few more times, maybe you’ll rattle something back into place._

Inadvisable.

Ulquiorra is about to stand again when there is some softer clanging nearby. Shuffling. More movement. A thick manuscript falls onto the floor with a heavy thud and a few loose sheets float in front of him. A hand emerges from behind the desk. Then a shoulder, a face, and the upper body of a Shinigami scrambling to pick everything up.

She looks up. She sees Ulquiorra.

Just as recognition flashes across her face, Ulquiorra has already pushed off the chair, pivoted on one foot, and taken cover behind a tall cabinet on the outside of the laboratory. Shit. His ankle twinges with a bone-deep soreness, the one that had just been reconstructed. Still fresh. It sits at a grotesque angle, misaligned by sonído. He balances awkwardly on his other foot, kneeling against the metal cabinet door while blood dribbles out into the bandages around his stomach.

Ulquiorra doesn’t fear her. Just his own fragility. He’s easy to rip apart into digestible pieces right now.

“Hello?” The Shinigami.

Ulquiorra leans his head back into the door, shifting his weight to extend his injured leg out. The ankle begins to heal. Bones scraping together, ligaments itching beneath his iron skin.

“I know you’re still there,” she says again.

Obviously. He doesn’t think so low of his enemies to assume they forget about whatever escapes their field of vision, like a pack of rabid newborns.

“Okay, I’m —” Something slides across the floor. Her zanpakutō stops before him, in its sheath. “I just want to see you. If you come out, I won’t do anything. We’ll talk.”

Neither did Ulquiorra come into this world yesterday. It’s not a Shinigami’s only weapon. But she feels inconsequential and he would rather be in the open than be trapped between the cabinets and the wall. He stands and slinks back out, one hand pressed to his oozing stomach.

The Shinigami is small, but still taller than Ulquiorra. She doesn’t wear a badge or any other notable additions to her uniform besides a white coat with pens tucked into the breast pocket. So she must be of the same sort as Szayel. Looting his work.

She is trembling in Ulquiorra’s presence. From fear, having thrown aside her best means of protection too quickly, or from simply being in his presence. A bit of both. The deer knows the wolf in the brush.

“What’s your name?” Her voice is tight.

Ulquiorra’s eyes dart to the side, behind her, as far around in their own sockets as possible. No one else is coming down the hall.

“I’m Ijima,” she continues. “I’m just taking these… these papers…” The manuscripts crinkle in her hands, shiny with sweat. Her arms flutter like leaves in the wind trying to hold everything up. Her eyes are nearly melting out of her head at the very sight of Ulquiorra. “I won’t cause you any trouble, I’ll just leave! B-but I’ll need my zanpakutō back.”

He looks down. The toe of his boot touches the sword she’d discarded. He picks it up and walks to her, offering it back. As soon as her fingers touch the grey scabbard, Ulquiorra jams the flat end of it up into the underside of her chin, her jaw and teeth crunching obscenely against the thick leather. The back of her skull smashes into the sharp edge of another cabinet, denting and bloodying it, cracking little glass tubes against each other. Her light hair turns thick and dark.

Ulquiorra turns the Shinigami’s zanpakutō over in his hands a few time, her blood staining the fabric hilt. These swords have spirits in them, too, parts of their owners. He can feel the emptiness of the blade, its vacating host in the girl’s brain matter on the laboratory floor. It takes them years to find and cultivate their spirits, only for it to be used against themselves. Ulquiorra can’t understand what it means to find the self, but he does know what it is to be killed by the self.

Footsteps come thundering down from a door on the other side of the laboratory.

“Ijima?”

“Ijima!”

Four distinct voices. Four Shinigami storm around the corner, stopping suddenly to witness the scene of horror before them. Each is similarly dressed in a white overcoat.

Ulquiorra raises his hand, and his bala sizzles the group of Shinigami to the bone. For a moment, all is still, until the surge of reiatsu retraces its path and his disfigured right arm erupts in a pain worse than any other. As if his attack had been returned to him in double and travels up and down his skeleton in electric shocks that don’t have anywhere else to go except bouncing back and forth. Green fissures glow and crackle beneath his matted black feathers.

He crumples to his knees. The pain intensifies, the agony multiplies, and he braces himself on his other elbow as he heaves in breaths that fog up the smooth floor. It pulsates through his entire body.

At this point, it may be easier for Ulquiorra’s consciousness to fade if the pain will not.

And so he fades, free-falling through reality.


	2. the divine right of kings

Ulquiorra is standing in a grave of water that laps at his knees and ripples around stalks of quartz branches sprouting from the smooth black bedrock beneath. The water has no discernible temperature, but it is dark and smells of blood. Everything here is empty. There are no other souls, no noises, and no boundaries to this place. Not even the mysterious voice that had accompanied him before.

Even though he wades through the water, his boots don’t fill up. His trousers cling wet to his legs but they don’t feel like anything against his skin. A figure emerges against the stark horizon like a mirage, forcing Ulquiorra to blink and squint against the bright white sky.

Aizen is here. When they stand a few feet apart, he smiles at Ulquiorra wistfully, though the expression on the rest of his face somehow doesn’t match the smile. Dead behind the eyes. He has Ulquiorra’s eyes. Speaking, but his voice makes no sound, just lingers in the cracks between the stones of the earth. There is disappointment in the shape of his lips. His reiatsu lodges itself in Ulquiorra’s throat.

Ulquiorra’s legs go weak, and he is forced to his knees before Aizen. What changed, that he now needs to be coerced into taking a knee before his master? Aizen puts one finger to the centre of Ulquiorra’s chest, and the feather-light touch pushes him backwards into the water, feeling more like loosely-packed sand scattered across the surface than a body. Thick black eels of hair swim around his face, his hands taken by a current with no origin and drifting to his sides.

It is so comfortable and familiar. There is peace in floating here forever.

For a while, Ulquiorra stares into the empty white sky, until his eyes become heavy and blinded. Then Aizen’s weight lands on his hips, sinking his body down into the viscous water and driving the spires of quartz branches up through his stomach. He can’t move his hands fast enough, the water has turned gelatinous. Aizen grabs both his wrists and impales both hands on quartz through the palms. With one hand, he cups Ulquiorra’s forehead, and with the other crumples his throat, keeping his face underwater.

Ulquiorra’s mouth fills with water and it coats the back of his throat like syrup, thick bubbles coming from his nose and sticking to his eyelashes.

Aizen doesn’t stop. Ulquiorra doesn’t stop him.

It would be just as easy to do nothing at all as it would be to kick his legs up and throw Aizen off, or rip his hands off his cross and strike god.

What is Ulquiorra going to do?

He’s going to die.

So what is he going to do?

_Grow wings…_

Ulquiorra comes to on the floor of Szayelaporro’s laboratory. He can’t tell the difference between his body and smashed bird eggs, all of it melding together and becoming a frothy muck of malformed feathers and bloody yolk. Murciélago’s arm aches — it’s easier to think of the corrupted parts of himself as belonging to someone else — but the pulsating pain has vanished.

He wonders if the voice that had awoken him was Murciélago’s at all. Is it a friend or a foe?

It answers, _Why should Murciélago and enemy be different?_

_Because Murciélago is part of me._

_Do you think you can’t be your own enemy?_ Beat. _Maybe Aizen wasn’t what you thought he was after all._

Stop it. Anything claiming to be himself, much less an ally, wouldn’t go against Aizen.

Every exhale fogs up the smooth floor beneath his head, and he stays like this for some time. It cools his cheek and his blood-soaked brain, reducing the heated swell of his body. He feels pulled apart at every ligament just enough to make him loose and gooey. Pliable. It’s what made him a good soldier; bleached, uncharacteristic, with stark obedience. Look where it’s gotten him.

That isn’t a point of mockery for Aizen. Ulquiorra doesn’t regret his quandary; it is the result of his own failure, despite having been given the correct tools. But if he had resisted Aizen’s sovereignty, he would have died long ago. Aizen had saved Ulquiorra, truly. Lifted him from his quartz grave, breathed a name into his mouth and put the sword into his hands, given him the agency to fight for his life and to eclipse the limits of those who had once thought themselves powerful. Vengeance had been a pleasant perfume on Ulquiorra’s tongue.

But now it’s how it had been before; he is small, insufficient, beaten against the wall for his lack of power. Perhaps rolling over and exposing his soft stomach to a row of teeth ten thousand years ago would have indeed been preferable to this.

Wrong. It’s all different now.

Szayel’s floor is no quartz forest. It fills him with malaise, a boredom. Everything has shattered into thousands of pieces, and Ulquiorra is the architect of what will become of it, but no enlightenment will come from inspecting the grout. He gets up and ventures further around the laboratory until he stops at a cupboard. A switch hidden on the inside pops open a nearby floor tile and reveals an alcove in the wall above it with an unmarked lever.

The metal lever is cool to the touch and Ulquiorra’s hand hesitates for a moment. Murciélago pulses in his wrist.

He almost forgot. The gas lamp in the cupboard. When its flame finally sputters to life, Ulquiorra heaves the lever down and quickly pulls up the tile, closing it over himself once he climbs far enough down the ladder below. Heat begins to emanate from tile’s seams. As he goes down and down and down, the dark black rock around him rumbles and shakes, sprinkling loose small chips of hematite on his shoulders.

Ulquiorra steps off the ladder into a long cave. There is something unnatural in its uniform shape with only one path out, like something had burrowed clean through Hueco Mundo. The gas lamp sways at his side, lighting up the curved cave walls. Huge bones in mismatched carcasses break the slimy black stone that gleams orange as he passes by. The corpses of skeleton kings who feasted upon each other, building up in layers until they breached like termites and basked in the moonlight. Some smaller bodies have been buried too, in the jaws of monsters. Quincies, Shinigami, maybe, who thought they could enter the realm of the dead to blood their zanpakutō for the first time.

But balance is balance. They must begrudge the existence of hollow, whether appreciated or not. Ulquiorra takes solace in his inevitability.

The cave continues on for some time, but Ulquiorra takes the next ladder wrought into the black stone. He leaves the gas lamp at the bottom and finishes his climb in complete darkness until he slams his elbow into the hatch above his head and lets in the bright Las Noches sun. He emerges somewhere in the middle of the city, plumes of smoke the only remnant of Szayel Aporro’s laboratory on the horizon. Though, half of the city seems to be in the same condition. It could be anything else.

Souls extinguish all over Las Noches like flames being put out. And such was all of their use, petty decoration for the halls.

Ulquiorra follows a flickering trail of reiatsu through the towers like reeds, the heel of his boot sticking in the open maws of fading arrancar and Shinigami alike as their bodies create new sedimentary layers. It would be only a matter of centuries before the sand covered it all and made a new foundation.

Between crumbled red fortresses, Grimmjow yells with the effort of dragging himself across the ground with one good arm. Every elbow-crawl closer to the shade severs the cleave across his chest further, leaving half of himself behind. He was left to die.

Ulquiorra walks alongside him for a few paces before he kneels and grabs Grimmjow by the underarm, heaving him up to slump over his shoulder. Better his feet to drag than his lungs.

With the last of his strength, Grimmjow seizes Ulquiorra’s neck in a headlock, his breath smelling metallic and so close it sprays drops of blood over Ulquiorra’s face. Their eyes lock, and there is still a bright blue fire behind Grimmjow’s. Ulquiorra wonders what can be seen in his own eyes.

“Don’t humiliate me.” Grimmjow’s head swings between his shoulders, dizzy and disoriented.

Ulquiorra considers dropping him. But he’s already this far. “There’s no one left to see you,” he says. Grimmjow’s thick forearm falls away from his throat, and Ulquiorra continues dragging him into the shade behind a shard of concrete. He props Grimmjow up and stands by him, waiting. If he survives, it will be a long time for him to heal.

Above, the dome’s sun splinters in half. Ulquiorra sees the tops of towers closest to where he had broken through turn into a green-black stone that crackles with sparks of green energy, a shimmering cloak on the edge of this fabricated world. Las Noches dims as the last piece of sky falls into the sand, creaking and screaming the whole way down. Darkness returns to all the land.

When he had been a Vasto Lorde, Ulquiorra heard the other hollows speak of a powerful hollow who would break the moon apart and from it torrents of evil spirits would pour out and overtake the Shinigami, giving them all free reign to devour the earth in its entirety. This had been said with mouths full of flesh. That which is spoken alongside carnal delirium should not be trusted.

It was the sun that broke and freed them all, not the moon.

“Why,” Grimmjow gurgles out, blood foaming out of his mouth and choking up the rest of his words. He stares listlessly at Ulquiorra.

Ulquiorra grinds his teeth, thinking. Grimmjow is both his colleague and enemy at any given moment, and he isn’t about to launch a counteroffensive against the Shinigami. But something of Ichigo lingers in the back of his mind, the boy’s drive to continue the fight no matter what. Ulquiorra often doesn’t think before he acts — not an impulsive drive, but an instinctual one. Even lacking Aizen’s direct guidance, he knew what to do in order to achieve a higher goal. Without it, he doesn’t know why he does anything. He doesn’t know what tells him to do anything.

So if he had to force a reason, it would be pathetic for Grimmjow, a superior being relative to humans and their ilk, to die like a rodent. If he passes in the next breath, it wouldn’t matter. At least it would be more respectable.

Ulquiorra doesn’t have to answer, anyways. _“Grimmjow? Grimmjow!”,_ someone is shouting. When Ulquiorra steps out from behind the stone wall, Nelliel nearly walks into him. She looks frazzled and ragged, but in tact. Unscathed and traitorous.

She’s still the third that Ulquiorra remembered. Weak by today’s standards. Even Grimmjow’s erratic highs are comparable to her, regardless of the numbers imprinted on each assembled corpse.

Ulquiorra had watched Nnoitra tear the masks off her fracción. He’d been invited to the spectacle. Once the tough skin melded into the bone fragments had snapped free, everything beneath had been gooey and pliant, pink and pulsing. The entire time, the two had not screamed for their own lives, but for Nelliel and her swift vengeance.

He supposes he can’t be too surprised by her wavering allegiance. Nelliel Tu is still, somehow, tragically human, and the moral of her story is that there are no morals.

“Ulquiorra,” she breathes, brow furrowed. “Ichigo… is…” A flurry of emotions pass over her face before she ends up on something approaching relief. “He’s alive. But what are you doing here?”

She looks down to Murciélago. Ulquiorra steps aside to block his arm from sight.

He asks her, “Shouldn’t you be with him?”

“I came back for Grimmjow.” She peeks around the wall and rushes to her knees beside him, assessing his injury. “Nnoitra couldn’t help but try to destroy one more thing before he went,” scornfully.

“Nnoitra didn’t destroy anything.”

“No. Maybe not by himself,” Nel glares over her shoulder at him. “All of you did.”

Ulquiorra tilts his head. Somehow, it is an accusing gesture. “You aren’t an arrancar anymore?”

“I’ve chosen to do better with my abilities than many of you,” she retorts as she attempts to drag Grimmjow to his feet. He groans listlessly and tries to resist until he loses even that strength. “Fighting amongst yourself for what? Everything has been ruined in the end.”

“If you’ll pretend you became what you are because you didn’t fight for it, you should have been thrown off a higher tower. There is only one way to obtain our power.”

Nelliel fusses with Grimmjow, slinging him over her shoulder like Ulquiorra had. “Are you going to help me or not?”

“No,” Ulquiorra replies.

“We should find somewhere in Las Noches to lay low for a while.”

“Surviving arrancar were instructed to go to the Negar ruins.”

Nelliel nods. “When the dust settles we can come back to look for survivors.”

Ulquiorra turns back towards the city. “I’ll meet you there.”

“Do you have somewhere else to be right now?” Nelliel taunts. When she gets no reply, she shrugs and takes off into the distance with Grimmjow in tow.

Ulquiorra’s quarters in the central compound of Las Noches had survived the battle. The metal staircase spiralling up to the private wing are looser on their railings than he remembered, but inside his room is as he left it. He takes one last step out onto the open air balcony, skimming his hand over the chipped concrete balustrades.

The desert beyond is motionless, but perhaps not entirely dead. Something squirms close to the surface, like a gaggle of Szayel’s metal bugs.

_Grow wings!_

“Shut up.” Anger bubbles through Ulquiorra like a course of magma. He restrains himself from crumbling the balcony into a pile of dust. It would be irrational, to act out against something he can’t even see. Speaking to it is also irrational, but the words have already leapt out. “Is that all you can say? Shut the fuck up.”

_Are you doing what you want right now?_

Ulquiorra grinds his teeth.

_Then grow wings!_

He turns back into the room and opens the wardrobe. Murciélago reflects in the mirror on the inside of the door, and his eyes dart away. Ulquiorra shoves a change of his clothing into a sling bag already packed with caja negación.

It’s not vanity. It’s the paradox of his appearance, to be so null of feeling and yet boast the tear streaks down his cheek; worthy of inspiring a certain kind of fury, that he doesn’t know why he possesses this mark. But before he shuts the wardrobe, he looks. He is small and frail in appearance, all the pieces of him awkwardly and haphazardly arranged into a dull body, but inside he is bursting at the seams. His thick, unruly hair. His face. The tears are still there, but his right eye is glowing yellow and the mark flowing from it thick and triangular. His mask is gone, only one long horn remaining and the other broken at the base.

_Was that so bad?_

What did it matter?

He is of an evil essence, through and through. Ulquiorra doesn’t know why he’s been so spineless, then, concerning Murciélago’s corruption. He exists. He acknowledges it is an abject existence. And Murciélago is with him.

* * *

“It’s been days,” Ulquiorra overhears an arrancar say beneath where he sits on a rooftop of the ruins. “Do you think Aizen will really come back?”

“Not if he’s dead,” another arrancar says.

“He’s preparing Seireitei for us,” a third, excitedly.

The first one scoffs. “Why would you want to go there?”

“Food,” the third replies, as if he’s already slobbering over all the human souls. “We might yet become Espada!”

“There’s no point to being an Espada anymore. If he never comes back for us, who are we? We might as well go find our own corners of Hueco Mundo to live in.”

The second agrees, “It’s not natural to sit around together and give each other better opportunities to kill us. No offence. I like you guys, but it makes my skin itch.”

“I don’t like any of you,” the first mutters glibly, but they all laugh and return inside.

Ulquiorra absently runs his fingers across his arm, through the patches of feathers as he watches the desert. Rip it off. It would be easy. It may even regrow into a familiar shape. Rip it off. He washed all the blood off himself, there’s no more need for trophies. Didn’t he hear, there’s no more need for Espada anyways? He should rip it off.

_How will you be able to fly with only one arm?_

Something moves across the horizon. Ulquiorra squints at the darkness. The figure stands out against the sky, dressed in white, but it stays where it is rather than moves closer. If it was an arrancar, it would be looking for the ruins and approach. It’s too far for Ulquiorra to sense its reiatsu, but it soon disappears behind the dunes.

Ulquiorra stands on the edge of the flat roof, but the figure is definitely gone.

It wouldn’t be particularly easy to stumble upon the Negar ruins if they weren’t looking for it or in the vicinity of Las Noches. The spread of the desert is too immense. These buildings are nothing as sprawling as the city’s complex systems of labyrinthine hallways, long discarded even before Las Noches was founded. The great hall he stands on now was built on the edge of a craggy outcrop, with around a dozen squat towers and two or three storeyed dwellings in the sand beneath it. A collection of broken aqueducts, archways, and wind-bitten spires decorate the surrounding area.

Everyone else is recovering and growing agitated. Ulquiorra feels heavy and he doesn’t sleep, because Aizen’s voice is sharp is his ears, telling him about how many times over he could have set Las Noches ablaze with every Shinigami soul trapped in it. It’s easier to withstand the reprimand in full consciousness rather than let it run through fantasy, when he can’t be sure of what’s real or not. But even now, reality seems like it could run through the spaces between his fingers.

A familiar reiatsu chimes into the back of Ulquiorra’s head, at the front entrance. He follows it off the opposite side of the roof and up the tall steps leading inside, where Harribel is waiting with her three fracción. She sheds a reiatsu-dampening cloak, and on her bare back Ulquiorra can see a wound that would have been a deep stab, but instead caught the edge of her hollow hole.

Apacci circles her master like an agitated predator, keeping eyes on Ulquiorra and Nelliel, who emerged from the back of the hall.

“How many of us left?” Harribel asks before Nelliel can greet her.

“Just us,” Nelliel replies. “Grimmjow, too. He’s recovering. There are about twenty arrancar in the rest of the ruins.”

Harribel nods solemnly. “The Shinigami Kurosaki Ichigo has defeated Lord Aizen.” A small smile flashes across Nelliel’s face, but it falls when Harribel continues, “I would cast you out as a traitor, but it matters little if it’s all been lost. We can discuss our next steps when we’re all available.”

The Tercera’s companions disperse at a gesture, and Nelliel slinks back to check on Grimmjow. Only she and Ulquiorra remain, her stare rooting him to the ground.

She tips her chin at him. “What happened to you?”

He shrugs.

“You let Las Noches be overrun with Shinigami.”

“The city doesn’t mean anything without Aizen in it.”

“Maybe so.” She adjusts her frayed jacket. “It doesn’t mean you had to burn it to the ground.”

“I was battling Kurosaki Ichigo,” Ulquiorra defends.

“For what purpose, I don’t know. Kurosaki Ichigo is more powerful than when he first came to Hueco Mundo,” Harribel says. “Even as I lay dying in the streets, I could feel his reiatsu. And I heard what Aizen had to say to him.”

“And?”

“Everything was supposed to go this way.”

“It did, until I failed to kill Kurosaki.”

“Even that was part of the plan, to draw out Kurosaki’s powers. Aizen sacrificed you and Las Noches. No,” she shakes her head. “You can’t sacrifice something that holds no value to you. He baited you.”

_Maybe Aizen wasn’t what you thought he was after all._

That sensation again. Like Ulquiorra’s body no longer holds in whatever his mind is composed of. Smashed eggs.

_Maybe Aizen wasn’t what you thought he was after all._

He flexes his hands, in and out of fists. “So be it.”

Ulquiorra’s death had been certain and had been guaranteed to be brutal. He’s never known life to be anything but a similarly guaranteed sequence of afflictions and torments. But instead of succumbing to what Aizen had planned for him, he now traverses something he knows nothing about at all. That is a torment in itself.

Harribel pushes the matter, “It doesn’t make you angry? I would have torn Aizen in half. I almost did.”

“It doesn’t make me feel anything,” Ulquiorra lies.

“There are still Shinigami in Las Noches?” Nelliel reenters, wiping her hands with a bloodied rag.

“I went to the city first to look for my fracción,” Harribel explains. “After two days, they began to leave, but you’d still think it a human city. It might be suspicious to them that there aren’t many arrancar there.”

“Do you think they’ll find the ruins?”

“If they find us,” Ulquiorra says, “We kill them all.”

“Incredible,” Nel sighs. “You somehow managed to say the only thing that could make everything even worse.”

* * *

Ulquiorra knows the moment that Grimmjow has recovered, because it coincides with the last moment of quiet in Hueco Mundo.

Something continued to linger on the horizon, and the other arrancar began to see it as well, but this was all a whisper beneath the moonlight. Grimmjow’s awakening rattled the teeth in Ulquiorra’s skull as soon as he started plodding around the ruins and goading everyone for a fight.

But he doesn’t ask Ulquiorra. He hangs his head in the great hall where they both wait for Harribel and Nelliel.

“You shouldn’t have saved me,” Grimmjow mutters, his voice tight like the words pain him.

“I didn’t heal you,” Ulquiorra points out.

He scoffs. “Yeah. Great. I got beat again.”

Ulquiorra doesn’t respond, because it’s obvious that he did indeed lose. He won’t waste his energy on pushing splinters further in.

“Wanted to be like you, y’know.” Grimmjow flicks granules of sand from his sleeves as he rolls each back up. “Wanted to be powerful enough to have everyone know it, just by looking. Without having to fight to prove it. S’all I wanted.”

“There’s no point. No one will fight for you.” Ulquiorra says. It has to suffice. This is the first civil conversation they’ve had with him, and it will be the last. It doesn’t suit either of them.

“Fuck,” groaning as he scrubs a hand down his face. “Fuck. We bonding or some shit?” He guffaws. “Don’t take it the wrong way, asshole. ‘M still gonna thrash you one of these days. I just gotta get Kurosaki first.”

“You know you will die.”

“Yeah, probably,” Grimmjow grins at Ulquiorra, all sharp teeth. “But dying fightin’ is the only way to live.”

When Harribel and Nelliel arrive, the four of them sit in a nook carved primitively into the wall, a misshapen table and lumpy stone bunches. Grimmjow cradles his chin in his palm and scrapes nonsense lines into the rock as Harribel and Nelliel quibble about the best way to attract more arrancar, but only arrancar, to the ruins.

Harribel interrupts, “If I’m going to be Queen —”

“Queen?” Grimmjow snaps his head up, paying attention now.

Harribel leans back and crosses her arms. “Yes.”

“I don’t like it. Why do you get Hueco Mundo?”

“Harribel is the strongest of us,” Nelliel interjects. “It makes sense this way.”

“Says who? As far as I remember, we all lost fightin’ the same enemy. Well, if you actually did fight.” Grimmjow glares at Nelliel. It bounces off her like a pebble.

“I _am_ the Tercera.”

“Yeah, according to Aizen. Don’t know if you noticed or not, but he’s gone. We don’t have to follow his rules anymore.”

“Let me guess,” Nel leans forward on the table. “You’re being a contrarian because you want to be the one to rule Hueco Mundo.”

Grimmjow sniffs indignantly. “Maybe. But real power is somethin’ different than standing around until the last minute to make a big splash.”

“What are you trying to say?” Harribel retorts.

Ulquiorra finally speaks up, “Why did we follow Aizen?”

Harribel answers first, “I respected his power.”

“His power,” Nelliel echoes.

Grimmjow grunts.

“We recognized it,” Ulquiorra says. “We gave him power over us. Before him, Barragan. So is it an arrancar’s nature to follow?”

“Hierarchy is good,” Nelliel mutters. “At least you know what to expect. I bet half of those Números would prefer it to being on their own in the desert.”

Grimmjow’s reiatsu flares and relaxes and flares again before he settles. “Fine. Whatever. Harribel can be queen. I’m out of here as soon as I figure out something else to do.”

The truth was that arrancar did not belong anywhere. The sun was a curse, under which nothing grew but the decaying evil of their existences. The ordained history, present, and modernity of the world was to always sit between the balance of Shinigami and hollow. There were lines that were not meant to be crossed, feet not supposed to wade in other dimensions or powers for longer than it took to consume a ravenous meal.

Power, queens, ranks, they did nothing to the white figure on the horizon.


	3. weltanschauung

Grimmjow finally goads Ulquiorra into a sparring match after he tore up the desert looking for worthy adjuchas and failed. There will never again be anything approximating an arrancar roaming the dunes; their moment shot across the sky in the twinkle of an eye.

A light sweat begins to break over Ulquiorra’s forehead as he dashes from corner to corner of an enclosed courtyard. Quartz branches grow from cracks in the concrete and climb up the sides of the ruins that border them on each side. Grimmjow’s fist smashes a thick limb into a thousand shards just as Ulquiorra ducks out of the way.

“C’mon,” Grimmjow whines. “At least try to hit me! Don’t just run away!”

True, dodging him forever is as easy as it is tedious. But there’s nothing stopping him from going beyond training and really trying to kill Ulquiorra. Whatever laws of Las Noches he failed to obey in the first place have now been sufficiently obliterated. Ulquiorra might be able to dispel a Gran Rey Cero, but he has nothing else.

He’s fought no one but himself for the last three months. 

Sometimes reiatsu sparks uncontrollably from his clawed fingers, fizzling like a shaken bottle, but he can overcome the urge to test his cero or bala by the flash of pain up his spine reminding him of what happened in Szayelaporro’s laboratory.

_Release me,_ he pleads with the impassive, stone-faced god that wields a part of his soul for its own diversion.

_Coward!_ it responds.

It’s not the pain. Ulquiorra can endure pain; pain is a side effect of success, that which is earned no other way but through sacrifice, but he cannot endure uselessness. He puts away the things he cannot vanquish.

Yet the fact that he’s ruined himself so thoroughly and so knowingly weighs on his soul.

Broken from thought, Ulquiorra is barely fast enough to catch Pantera grinding on the side of his forearm, the blade shrieking against his hierro. Grimmjow comes again and again, trapping Ulquiorra in a corner against a tangle of quartz vines that creak and crackle. He switches arms, blocking with Murciélago. Green reiatsu discharges on the next hit, coiling around Pantera like a cloud of lightning, and Grimmjow tears away with a yelp.

As soon as Ulquiorra moves from the corner, Grimmjow is at his back and firing a bala. He dashes away, the sole of his boot catching in the smoke that billows from where he’d just stood, the stone and sand now fulgurite.

When Ulquiorra lands on solid ground, Grimmjow is in front sweeping his ankles from underneath him, but Ulquiorra uses the momentum of his fall to right himself, plant his foot on Grimmjow’s extended leg, and push them away from each other.

Grimmjow catches himself by dragging the tip of his zanpakutó through the ground, scoring the courtyard, but then suddenly he’s above Ulquiorra and coming down with a swing. But Ulquiorra sees it, and rams his elbow into the inside of Grimmjow’s wrist as it comes down over his head.

Grimmjow’s fingers fall open involuntarily and his zanpakutō clatters to the ground between them. Instead, he recovers his grip and grabs Ulquiorra’s arm, dragging him down to pin him to the ground. Grimmjow’s victorious grin melts away when he leans over Ulquiorra and is blocked by a raised knee to his chest, and second Pantera’s edge across his throat.

“Got me.” His short chuckle implies the loss has already rolled off him, but the crease between his eyebrows betrays him. He lifts off Ulquiorra and sheathes Pantera when offered back to him.

Ulquiorra follows him to where a jug of water and clean cloth sit on a windowsill. Grimmjow dips the cloth in the water and scrubs at the back of his neck, under his arms. Drops of water fall down his broad shoulders, catching on the edges of his scabbed chest.

“Does it hurt?” Ulquiorra asks.

Grimmjow swipes a wet hand across the scar, collar bone to waist. “Yeah, I guess. Hurts deep. Nelliel tells me to take it easy, but…” He trails off when he hears a few arrancar enter the building, talking from another room.

“We had an army in Las Noches,” one of them shouts. “What happened to all of us?”

“Calm down. They might still come.”

“From where? Up out of the ground?”

“Maybe,” one mutters, clearly having gone through the same conversation before.

“It’s been months,” the angry one continues. “The only Shinigami that came to Hueco Mundo were the ones to get the girl and fight the Espada. I didn’t see them come in by the hundreds!”

“So what?”

“So, _what happened to all of us_ if there wasn’t anyone to fight us all! There’s something else.”

“I saw something weird the other day,” a new voice says meekly. “I was out in the desert yesterday and I saw someone, just standing around. Whenever I tried to get closer, they moved away, but they didn’t run or anything. It’s like they were watching me.”

_The figure on the horizon,_ Ulquiorra thinks.

The arrancar all start talking and arguing at the same time. Grimmjow fixes Ulquiorra with a hard look and slings the wet cloth over his shoulder as they move away from the window.

“They’ll rip each other apart if they don’t get answers,” he says.

“That’s not my problem,” Ulquiorra replies.

“Hey, fuckhead,” Grimmjow swats him with the cloth, hard enough to sting. “You said Ichigo wasn’t your problem either, now look what happened.”

Ulquiorra presses his lips together.

“The look on your fuckin’ face,” Grimmjow laughs. “You owe me. What’s the big deal? We go out and see who this loser hanging out in the desert is and kill them. We all stay happy.”

Ulquiorra follows him out of the courtyard through a gated alley. “You just want to kill something.”

“Hell yeah, I do!”

They reconvene at the edge of the ruins soon after, flashing across the desert until the buildings are nothing but a tiny fleck on the horizon. Ulquiorra stops on the crest of a dune, but it’s only the two of them here, and no mysterious figure.

“You think this is far enough?” Grimmjow stretches his back absent-mindedly.

“I’ve seen it too,” Ulquiorra admits. “Someone on the horizon.”

“Don’t think that’s something anyone else would like to know about?”

“I have no obligation to you.” Just as Grimmjow is about to open his maw and start complaining, Ulquiorra stops him with a hand across his chest. “Over there,” he tips his chin towards a rocky drop off in the distance.

It’s not the same all-white figure running along the canyon edge, this one a mix of black and white. Ulquiorra and Grimmjow approach from the side, but it seems preoccupied with something chasing from behind. The wind rips a hood off the figure’s head, revealing a streak of pink hair.

“You’ve gotta be shitting me,” Grimmjow shouts. “Szayel!”

Szayel stumbles to a halt, his eyes wild and confused behind his glasses. Then something shoots out from the corner of Ulquiorra’s eye, and Szayel is pulled flat to the ground, scrabbling uselessly at the cliff edge.

There is a vicious metal grapple lodged into his upper thigh attached to a rope, and pulling him backwards. In his struggle, he loses his grip and slides into the canyon, thrown against the rocks by the relentless pull of the rope.

“Get Szayel,” Ulquiorra tells Grimmjow, and doesn’t wait for an answer before he darts off to find the end of the rope.

The closer he gets, the more the dimension of Hueco Mundo itself begins to feel shrouded by a looming spectre, suspicion tingling the hair at the back of his neck. The horizon’s white figure is a human female wielding a sleek crossbow attached to the rope, fighting to reel it in. Two others stand around her, also in white. Crosses dangle from their belts.

Not humans. Quincy.

“Look at that!” The woman yanks the crossbow back. “I thought I caught a good one, but here comes a real prize!”

While both her hands are preoccupied, Ulquiorra breaks his sonído on the Quincy’s skull to her left, his knee crunching through flesh and bone. Before the other one can even shout, Ulquiorra’s claws jam into his eye sockets.

The female Quincy makes a disgruntled noise and leaps back, disconnecting the rope from her crossbow. Blue reishi flames off the end of the next loaded bolt, and streaks through the dark sky as it explodes in front of Ulquiorra’s feet.

“Magnificent hunting grounds you have here,” she says. “The air is so rich with reishi, I could do this forever.” She unloads a battery of bolts at him, tracking him through the air as he finds invisible footholds.

She seems more hesitant to fire the closer he remains, so he stays within arm’s reach.

“You were watching us,” he says.

“Most days.”

“Why?”

“I was feeling peckish,” she squints as she looks down the end of the crossbow, but doesn’t pull. “Like I said, everything here is made of reishi. Maybe I was hoping one of you would come out to meet me. Yhwach gave me this terrible appetite for you.”

“Who’s Yhwach?”

“The god of us all,” she breathes reverently. Ulquiorra recognizes the dazed shine in her eyes just before she fires a volley this time, her fiery blue bolts spreading out in a cone. One nicks the curve of his neck, and despite his hierro, it scalds.

It burns.

Ulquiorra palms at his neck and the blackened, leathery palm of his hand comes away bloody and stringy with gooey, melted skin. He smells something beyond burnt skin. Crackling bone and sizzling muscle. His left arm is eroding from his body, slopping off into the sand at his feet.

The Quincy laughs in triumph, poses with her crossbow thrown over her shoulder.

He could dodge Grimmjow forever because Grimmjow would never actually bare his claws. So what does he have to think about now? This isn’t Ichigo. This Quincy is a corpse waiting to be made. He doesn’t know why he’s being so tactful.

Ulquiorra’s body throbs distantly, like the bonds between his very atoms are being dissolved in the same way as his arm. Everything around him is unfolding like a prearranged act, and he is merely the observer. From this vantage point, he is both removed and perfectly in control. He could decide who lives and who dies.

The fact of the matter is, he is the judge, jury, and executioner. He has a power he’s never truly had before.

The Quincy shouts, “If you’re not going to do anything with your hands, I’ll just take them off you!”

Murciélago pulses, but in a new way. Not in a way meant to restrain Ulquiorra. Tension builds at the tips of his claws, and there is no block to his reiatsu.

_I thought I can’t fly with only one arm,_ he thinks.

_I never said you couldn’t. I asked how you would._

Murciélago has defiled Ulquiorra, but never let him down. He barely lifts his hand for his sickly green cero to fire, and it does not hurt.

Before it hits the Quincy, she braces her feet as best she can in the dunes and brandishes a silver medallion. She takes the cero head on, and it pushes her through the desert, plumes of sand behind her, but it dissipates to reveal her unharmed.

“Your reiatsu is disgusting,” she says, “but my appetite has no limits.”

There is always a limit, and Ulquiorra has skill in finding them.

Back to dodging her bolts. She grows more insistent, but she slowly ignores how Ulquiorra inches closer to her again until one bolt explodes too close, and she suddenly pulls her trigger hand back with a sharp hiss, shaking it off.

It’s his opening.

Ulquiorra moves in front of her and catches her as she tries to stagger back away from him with his forearm through her chest. His claws slip easily around her heart, feeling its rapid pulsing still in his palm.

She slumps forward. “I could use both arms,” she says weakly, wetly. “I’ll just eat your reishi up faster like this.”

“You can have it.” And he pours as much of his reiatsu out into Murciélago as he can, the fissures in the mottled skin turning hot, into a green inferno. When he feels his skin start to decay, he adds more fuel to the fire.

“No,” the Quincy’s body falls further down his arm instead of pulling herself back up. “It’s too much, no, no, I’ve had enough!”

“I’m giving you want you wanted.”

She only sobs, “I’ve had enough!”

She eroded Ulquiorra’s wrist down to the bone, but all the damage has been done. Her heart withers and turns to ash in his palm and she falls limp to the sand, christening Murciélago with her blood. The raw edges of flesh around her ribs are crispy and feel away like ancient paint. The smell is acrid, lingering, and distinctly human.

The medallion she wielded earlier catches his eye with a silvery glint, and so he pries it out of her stiffening fingers. Before tucking it away in his pocket, he flips it over a few times to inspect its inscriptions.

Ulquiorra’s other arm has already regenerated to his elbow, and he flexes his newly formed hand by the time he returns to where he’d left Grimmjow with Szayel.

Grimmjow regards him suspiciously, until he realizes he missed out on the fight. “The fuck?” He gestures at Ulquiorra illustratively.

“Quincy.”

“The _fuck?”_

“What about him?” Ulquiorra looks down to Szayel, unconscious at Grimmjow’s feet, pale and covered in a sheen of sweat.

“The wuss passed out. I ain’t lugging him back.”

So Ulquiorra kneels beside Szayel, holds his injured leg in place, and yanks out the grapple stuck in the meat of his upper thigh. Szayel comes to screaming.

“Oh, yeah,” Grimmjow sticks a finger in his ear. “I coulda come up with that, if I wanted to be fuckin’ annoyed.”

“You troglodyte! I’ll bleed out!” Szayel chides through his hyperventilating.

Grimmjow sniffs indignantly at him. “Check out his get up,” he says to Ulquiorra. “Wonder where he got those.”

Beneath the white hooded cloak, Szayel is wearing black silky robes trimmed with white. “Nowhere,” he mutters, one forearm thrown over his closed eyes as he shivers.

“Yeah?” Grimmjow comes around to Ulquiorra’s side and jams the broad knuckle of his middle finger into one of the puncture wounds in Szayel’s leg, holding him down in the sand as he writhes and screams. “Don’t think Aizen made those for you special, did he?”

“No! No!” Szayel struggles against Grimmjow helplessly. “The Shinigami did!”

Grimmjow grinds his knuckle in deeper. “Why’d they give you such a pretty outfit, huh?”

Ulquiorra stops him with a hand on his wrist. When he pulls away in disgust, Szayel rolls onto his side and heaves breath and bile.

“Get up,” Ulquiorra says to Szayel. He could see Grimmjow’s eyes alight like the Quincy’s blue reishi fire as he stalks around, bristling and one misstep away from something he’d no doubt regret, but do anyways. “He’ll kill you if you can’t.”

Ulquiorra doesn’t know that, really, but it’s convincing enough to a low-rung animal like Szayel to get him onto his elbows, then finally into an awkward one-legged stance. By the time they return to the ruins and the main hall where Harribel holds her court, Grimmjow’s oppressive wrath has turned into sulking. Szayel sinks into the carved stone benches to keep his leg straightened out.

“You’re going to have half of the arrancar drooling with all this blood!” Nelliel playfully calls out as she follows their dripping trail, but once she enters the hall and sees Szayel, her face turns stony and restrained.

Harribel practically floats as she comes down from her chambers upstairs. “What’s happened now?”

“Quincy,” “This motherfucker!” Ulquiorra and Grimmjow say at the same time.

Ulquiorra tries again. “There were Quincy in the desert, chasing Szayel.”

“And where did Szayel come from?”

“Yeah, tell her, fuckin’ snake!”

“I…” Szayel huffs a long piece of hair out of his face. “I embarrassingly admit to my defeat and capture by the Shinigami. They imprisoned me! They put me on trial! They sentenced me for _crimes against humanity,_ a farce in itself. What ever happened to all’s fair in love and war!?”

“But you escaped?”

“Ah… no. Some of the Shinigami have enough cognitive capacity to recognize that I am useful and recruited my assistance with their research and such,” he waves his hand in the air dismissively. “For the generosity of my genius, I am rewarded with a reduced sentence of… five hundred years! I was only coming to see what the state of affairs was like in Hueco Mundo when the Quincy found me.”

“What were they doing here in the first place?” Nelliel asks.

“Hunting,” Ulquiorra replies. “They can feed off the reishi here.”

“Then I suppose the question becomes why they decided to do that now of all times. It’s clear they know how to come into Hueco Mundo and survive. They might keep coming back.”

“I won’t be target practice for them,” Grimmjow declares. “I wanna know the second every single one of the fuckers comes in!”

“It’s not safe outside the dome of Las Noches,” Nelliel remarks.

Harribel crosses her arms disapprovingly. “The dome was not what made us strong.”

“It certainly helped us not indiscriminately slaughter each other if we knew there was someone watching,” Szayel says.

“But discriminate slaughter is fine.” Nel’s glare could melt through steel.

“According to the nature of our kind. If your concern is not being detected, or knowing what happens in proximity of the ruins, I come to the rescue as always. I will have these sorts of devices in my laboratory.”

“You can’t go to your laboratory,” Ulquiorra says.

“And why not?”

“I set it on fire."

Szayel’s face pales, practically green and translucent. “You…” he puts a hand to his forehead, his eyes distant and watery. “Why would you do that?”

“There were Shinigami in it.”

“So your only solution is to burn everything down?”

Ulquiorra shrugs one shoulder.

“My God,” Szayel whispers. “My God.”

“Grimmjow,” Harribel disturbs his anxious stalking back and forth through the hall. “You’re in charge of organizing some kind of patrols. Take the números out regularly to look for Quincy. It might alleviate some of their boredom.”

He grins, finally pleased with something. “Do I get a license to kill?”

“It would be impossible to take that right from you in the first place.”

“Damn right! I’m goin’ Quincy hunting!” He practically leaps down the staircase outside to round his troops.

Harribel addresses Szayel now, “Your obligations to the Shinigami mean nothing to me, nor do the Shinigami themselves. I am the ruler of Hueco Mundo, as any other hollow who came before, and I defend what is mine. I don’t care what you do here, so long as the Shinigami are clear that we do not interfere in each others’ matters.”

When he nods sullenly, she dismisses them all with a nod and returns upstairs.

Out in the hallway, Nelliel lingers around Ulquiorra as he waits for Szayel to gather himself. She holds herself stiffly, one hand on the hilt of her zanpakutō. “I would recommend staying far away from Szayel Aporro. It’s your choice in the end. But it would be a bad one if you didn’t. He’s nothing but trouble.”

Ulquiorra knows.

“He destroys everything he touches.”

But he has nothing left that he hasn’t already destroyed himself.

“You should think about a contingency plan for when he decides to throw you away too.”

“I have even less use for him,” Ulquiorra says.

Nel lowers her head, resigned. “Good luck, then. Don’t stand too close to any precipices.”

He doesn’t need to be lectured. Not from someone like her. She is too human to understand Ulquiorra — her type of heart is easily swayed, easily slighted, and quick to assume. It’s not so much a personality flaw as it is an ingrained nature. Ulquiorra doesn’t have the kind of finesse required to barter with it. He’d rather shatter it.

_Do you even understand yourself?_ Murciélago’s whisper dances from ear to ear.

No, he doesn’t. But there must be something to hold onto.

Szayel limps beside Ulquiorra all the way back down the ridge and into the top room of a tower he claimed for himself. There, Ulquiorra leans against the edge of a stout cement table. “Are you going to tell the Shinigami about the Quincy?”

Szayel pouts and leans his head back against the ratty chair he sank into. “I don’t know,” he says after a while. “I should, as per our contract. But this is something so new, even unfathomable…”

“They’ll find out you knew and didn’t.”

“Only if you tell them I knew!” Szayel folds his arms around his middle, like he’s comforting himself. “Eventually, they’ll know. Maybe not until all the balance in the universe is sufficiently obliterated, knowing how much the Shinigami like to sniff their roses before they notice anything else exists."

“Would it be so unacceptable?” Ulquiorra asks.

“Would what be?”

“A lack of balance.”

“Are you asking for my professional opinion?”

“We’ve taken the Shinigami’s word on their importance for maintaining balance, allowing ourselves to be prisoners to their paradigm since birth.”

Who was the first Shinigami and the first hollow, to discover this supposed balance, to require Ulquiorra’s life to be unknowingly sold into this manifesto? Who was the mightier of the two, to believe it their right?

Szayel regards Ulquiorra suspiciously. “This is a grim sermon you’ve chosen to impart upon me. What’s this mood of yours about?”

Ulquiorra works his jaw. “Nothing.”

“A rather talkative nothing.” But Szayel doesn’t press any further. “I daresay we don’t even know why those Quincy were here. It may have been a rogue few that decided to have an adventure.”

“Yhwach,” Ulquiorra remembers the name the Quincy had invoked. “Their god.”

“It’ll never end, will it? Everyone has to play a fool to their own god.”

Tense silence.

He thinks Szayel wants him to have a moment of existential revolution where he leaps and bounds out of Aizen’s chains. But Aizen still lingers in the edges of Ulquiorra’s vision and his mouth is a steel-jaw trap that could not even fathom the shape of the words Szayel asks for.

“Well,” Szayel lets a heavy breath out through his nose. “I told you before you went to take care of Ichigo that I’d see you later, didn’t I?”

“Here you are,” Ulquiorra says. “Unfortunately.”

A moment of silence. “Was that supposed to be a joke?” Despite his grave tone, Szayel is grinning. He asks again as he moves in front of Ulquiorra, keeping him against the table and leaning down to get a look at his face. “Is that a joke? Are you teasing me!?”

Ulquiorra’s hair obscures his face as he tries to move his head away, but Szayel’s smooth hand cups his cheek and pulls his head back forward to kiss him once, firmly.

“But I don’t forgive you for burning down my laboratory,” Szayel says with somehow both humour and so much resentment it pours out of his mouth like a polluted delta.

“I’ll never ask for it,” Ulquiorra replies.

* * *

On the third patrol in the desert, two arrancar go missing. Their souls are pulled from the weave of the universe.


	4. thesis, antithesis, synthesis

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a double length chapter to celebrate its end. [recommended listening material...](https://youtu.be/66VnOdk6oto)

“There’s nothing any of you can do for us!” Pjeter shouts. The número is stood defensively in front of a group of four others in Harribel’s main hall. “It’s never been your intention to protect us when all that matters is that you stay alive!”

“But you’ll send us out to do the work for you,” an arrancar adds over Pjeter’s shoulder.

“And it doesn’t matter if we come back or not!”

“I made a commitment to protecting Hueco Mundo from outside intruders,” Harribel says. “Your ability to live free and however you desire is my main concern. So, no, I do not pledge to protect every individual hollow. But to join the enemy that seeks to disrupt our natural domain as you are is indefensible.”

“I am no longer a hollow,” Pjeter hisses. “You might be able to kill me quickly, but I have power in knowing I am not a mere animal and spending all my time with my nose to the filthy ground.”

Ulquiorra sits on the end of a stone bench, his elbows and forearms braced on his knees. Sometimes he still expects to look down and see his guts spilling onto the ground between his legs. 

“Are you trying to rehabilitate yourself?” Harribel asks.

“What?” Pjeter sneers at her.

“Your ego is wounded because we lost. You think you can change it now, the misdeeds you think you did.”

It cannot be done. Ulquiorra encroached a certain line long ago that deemed it more fair to be tortured and killed for his sins than to be pitied and taken under the wing of a new god. He is not deserving of mercy.

Charity would imply he made mistakes. But Ulquiorra knows what he’s done, and none of it was by accident. None of it was wrong. None of it was any more abhorrent than how he wanted it to be. If the Shinigami and the Quincy did not want harms to come as they did, they should not have sent more children to the slaughterhouse. There had been no ambiguity regarding what Ulquiorra was capable of, or what he would do.

There can be, then, no justice the Quincy would deliver and there is nothing cleansing enough. Ulquiorra doesn’t know why the Quincy wants hollow, but it is in their sinister ministry to either disappear their souls or strip them of their beings.

“Yhwach will restore balance! A world in which we don’t have to live by your rules of life, death, competition!”

“This is balance,” Ulquiorra finally speaks up. “Death begets life.”

“Exactly the kind of thinking all of you are trapped in.” Pjeter motions to the arrancar gathered with him. “We are leaving. You will all see what awaits, but you may only reap its benefits if you come with us.”

Silence befalls the hall until Harribel asks the remaining Espada, “Am I wrong to not chase after them and make them stay?”

“For all any of us know, the Quincy will kill them all anyways. It might just be an easier way to round us up and catch us off guard,” Nelliel replies sullenly.

“If we’re going to keep risking going out there to keep an eye on them, we need to protect ourselves more at home.” Harribel addresses Szayel, “Is there anything from Las Noches you can salvage?”

Szayel grimaces. “I make no promises. Seireitei expects me back in two days and this _dunce,”_ he gestures to Ulquiorra, “ruined my laboratory. But being blessed with exceptional foresight as I am, there may be something to work with.”

“Work quick.” And the Espada are dismissed, as easily and as naturally as after one of Aizen’s meetings.

“Ah-ah,” Szayel snags Ulquiorra by the collar of his uniform. “You’re coming with me! You break it, you buy it. What else are you going to do here anyways, mope up in your tower like some melancholic Rapunzel?”

Between the ruins and Las Noches, the only sound that inhabits Hueco Mundo is the haunting creaks of Hell’s gates. Not even the wind dares blister the sandwastes. On the horizon, occasionally, a strange blue fire twists into spires and funnels and then spreads across the dunes, broken only by deep dips in the sand and crystal trees.

Those with some vestiges of luck still have corpses to their names. Ulquiorra has seen what becomes of hollow when killed by Quincy. That is to say, nothing becomes, and nothing remains. He remembers the pathetic pinpricks that had been the Quincy Uryu’s arrows. It seems unfathomable, except by factors of sheer stupid bravery, to go out and deal devastation to armies of arrancar in the way.

“Troglodyte,” Szayel hisses accusingly at Ulquiorra when he surveys the damage to his laboratory from the edge of Las Noches’ main pavilion. Smoke and fire still rise from the deep underground compounds.

“You already called me that once.”

“Imbecile. Halfwit! Flockbrain!” Szayel crouches to attend to a radar set on the building, pulling a compact set of tools from beneath his cloak. “Do you enjoy this type of denigration? Why, you naughty boy. Be a peach and hold this,” he shoves a flashlight into Ulquiorra’s hand.

Half-turned away from Szayel, working to unmount the machinery, Ulquiorra can stare down at Aizen’s throne through a hole in the roof.

Burn marks and old blood mottle what had once been streakless purple tile. But the marble throne remains, unmarred, without so much as a footprint on the pedestal. Ulquiorra had stood there, for a moment, and protected it better than anything else here from Ichigo.

Ichigo’s rancid hollow reiatsu still lingers on the edge of this destruction. But if Ulquiorra were to look up — his own reiatsu licking at the clouds, a green-black vortex that tinges everything an off-colour evening. The epicentre of his death. His entire body aches in such a way that he thinks it’s all coming apart again, and if he thinks any longer on these things then Szayel will have to grab handfuls of his corpse out of the breeze.

“Keep it steady,” Szayel snaps. Ulquiorra locks his wrist.

Why had he done this? What had he done in Las Noches? To make Aizen, a man, into a god, that which is everything and nothing. But man is a thing with limits. Ulquiorra could touch the edges of Aizen, and when Aizen was gone, there was nothing of him left.

What, deep in Ulquiorra’s mind, had allowed it all to be so easy to believe?

“Head in the clouds?” Szayel’s saccharine voice, suddenly, in his ear. He pries the flashlight out of Ulquiorra’s fingers and replaces it with a few metal bolts. “What a terrible old dog you are, you can’t even _stay_ and _sit._ Should I get a whistle? A treat dispenser?”

He attends back to the radar with only a dry chuckle.

Something else grabs Ulquiorra’s eye, a shimmer in the moonlight overhead. A person dressed in white, the back of them, on the top of a higher tower surveying the city. Murciélago’s clawed fingers twitch, almost as a reminder. Of what, pain or overcoming?

“Szayel,” Ulquiorra says.

He hums. “Just a moment.”

The cloaked person suddenly whips around to face Szayel and Ulquiorra, taking on an alarmed but readied stance. Even from this far away, Ulquiorra recognizes Ishida Uryuu and his hardened glare but feebly beating rabbit heart. He is paralyzed by Ulquiorra’s presence.

Szayel yanks the radar off the roof with a metallic scraping before he finally snaps out his reverie. “What’s that now?” He traces Ulquiorra’s line of sight to Uryuu and recoils as though he’s been burned.

“I thought you two had been disposed of,” Uryuu shouts down to them. “You just can’t help but be a disgusting stain on the world!”

“Now,” Szayel drawls. “There’s no need to be so cruel, little Quincy. You’re in a tizzy because we left off on a low note. Come down here and we can finish what we had going for me!”

“I won’t be getting anywhere near you.” Uryuu adjusts his glasses and materializes his bow, a tall pale shimmer of blue. “And I won’t fire any warning shots.”

Uryuu’s barrage of arrows whistle through the air, and Ulquiorra has no time to evaluate a course of action before he has to take the brunt of them, blocked only by his arm and side as he half-turns away. It narrowly missed Szayel.

A little more than pinpricks now, but still the reishi diffuses across Ulquiorra’s body like a breeze, albeit a stinging one.

Uryuu pulls back the string of his bow and holds. The arrow that manifests in his bow grows in size, its tip flaring and flaming. The air smells thick with reishi, electric and like sand calcified by lightning.

Like above the dome of Las Noches many months ago, where Ulquiorra could glide through reishi free and vicious.

_When you had wings…_

Ulquiorra’s fingers twitch again. He watches the arrow loose and fires a cero to counteract it, green and spiralling. But the world is what spirals, twists and bleeds around itself as Ulquiorra’s vision doubles and goes blurry. The pain shrieks up Murciélago’s arm, blistering and overwhelming. There are only so many ways to describe it, and only so many ways for his nerves to process it. Pain turns to numbness, and he crumples to his knees, but he finds only open air as he falls down into the hole in the roof.

Desperately, he catches onto the edge with his good arm, but the energy is drained from him and his fingers fail like the weak, worn creases of a paper. Ulquiorra’s pelvis cracks onto the armrest of Aizen’s throne, his tailbone on a step, and finally his shoulder breaking his fall on the floor. He writhes on the cool tile, his slack-jawed open mouth smearing and gasping and choking on the holy dust that coats the throne room.

Sparks of green from his fissured skin cast ominous shadows across the tall pillars, arcing from one finger to the next. Long minutes of shadow theatre. Some sway like nooses. Others are swords over his head. Eventually, it fizzles to a close, and the pain is but a soreness left in the palm of his hand.

Something lands on the floor near Ulquiorra with a heavy thud. Uryuu, come to finish him off?

“Cifer,” it’s Szayel’s haughty hiss. He is frazzled but ostensibly unhurt. “Did you hit your head so spectacularly you thought you merited a little nap? Are you aware that of all people, Ishida Uryuu has attempted to murder us yet again? And here you are! Don’t you look comfortable!”

Ulquiorra narrows his eyes. “I can’t stand.”

“Oh, boo. And I suppose you’d like me to do something about it.”

If he’s going to be forced to hear Szayel complain the entire time, then no.

Ulquiorra’s left hip has popped grotesquely, that leg flopped inoperably outwards. He pulls himself to brace on both elbows, as far as he can until he encounters a sharp flare across his lower half. He reaches around and gropes at his hip, mashing the slurry of bone and muscle there until he feels the pieces come back together. Then he forces his hip back into place with a push, the same with his knee. He does not make a sound, piecing his toy soldier body back together.

When he stands, Szayel chirps, “See, you could get so much done without that dour look on your face, moping around, ‘oh, Szayel Aporro, I can’t stand! Woe!’”

He looks up through the hole he’d fallen through. His eye lingers on the large craters he’d left on Aizen’s marble throne. Now it was thorough and complete, his destruction of all there was.

“Uryuu split rather quickly,” Szayel informs him. “The noble little boy thinks he can win wars without killing anyone in the process. It’s almost as though he doesn’t know what he gets into.”

“Are we at war?”

“I would say we’ve had plenty of inciting incidents. They should count more towards skirmishes. We’re waiting for our Agincourt, now.”

“The equipment,” Ulquiorra prompts.

“Oh, yes, yes,” Szayel pats a cloth sack slung over his shoulder. “But I will need to harvest supplies from other areas. I advise we not go back out there until we leave the city.”

In silence, Szayel leads him through the dark halls to collect his materials.

Ulquiorra feels bruised — not on his body, but on the soul.

* * *

Szayel assembles the final piece, the radar, on the roof of Harribel’s hall with the Espada to bear witness. “How crude,” he complains as he struggles with wrenching the last bolt. “But the perimeter has been established and the monitors attuned to Quincy reiatsu. If one should cross into the ruins, you will certainly know about it.”

Harribel nods. She seems uncomfortable giving any thanks.

“One last thing…” Szayel hesitates as he stands to face them all, squeezing his hands back into his gloves and looking to Ulquiorra.

“Ishida Uryuu was in Las Noches. He attacked us,” Ulquiorra says.

Silence.

“He was allied with the Shinigami. There could be a reason he was here,” Harribel suggests.

“The Shinigami are no true friends to Uryuu,” Nelliel says. “We can’t look past the facts — he’s another Quincy in Hueco Mundo. Harribel, you said you would protect Hueco Mundo, and we’re here to do it with you. There needs to be something done.”

“Are you saying you want me to kill Ishida Uryuu?” Harribel asks. “You can volunteer yourself for the task.”

“No! I wouldn’t do that to my friend!”

“Your friend!?” Grimmjow slams his fist on the balustrade, sending chips of stone flying into the air. “You can’t complain about the fuckin’ Quincy killing us and then still say he’s your friend!”

“He is,” Nel urges. “He has a good heart. He wouldn’t want to do something like this.”

“And yet here he is.” Harribel crosses her arms. “It should be assumed he’s an important part of the Quincy puzzle, considering his strength.”

“So we gotta take him out,” Grimmjow snaps.

“You do it, then.”

He immediately recoils. “Savin’ my time for Kurosaki, thanks. The Queen’s got better things to do?”

“I’m not sure killing Ishida is the only option we have right now.”

“We need to find a way to talk to the Quincy,” Nelliel suggests. “We’re guessing at what they want and it might just make more problems for us.”

“Killing us on sight ain’t enough of a statement of purpose for ya?” Grimmjow jeers.

Ulquiorra’s lips twitch. So much quarrelling for who would do what with what amount of staining on their soul. The acceptable limits of murder. He has consideration for neither morality nor mode. He can get anything done if need be.

_Except the most important thing of all. You let Aizen down!_

“I’ll kill him,” Ulquiorra breaks the tumult. Everyone pauses and stares at him, weighty gazes that pass both judgement and relief onto him. It won’t be any of them as the executioner, better the one without any value. Without any humanity left to lose. He understands his utility. “I will just do it.”

Nelliel pales. “I don’t want to hear anything about this.”

He would be sure to bring her Ishida’s head, out of spite.

“Good riddance,” Szayel mutters.

“Killing a child,” Nelliel shakes her head, looking down at her feet. “Killing a child…”

_The children killed you first,_ Murciélago’s parting whisper before Ulquiorra drifts to sleep later.

His dreams, not an often occurrence, turn to mush in his mind. They shift like sand, all nonsense but perfectly coherent in the world of imagination. When he walks on walls instead of the floor, it is in the logic of that universe. When he finds himself in a cold Seireitei prison cell, deep underground and feeling like he’s being flattened to the ground by reiatsu suppressants, he knows why he is there and why Captain Shunsui is interrogating him as if the entire story had already been played out.

“Don’t you want to know what happened to Aizen?” Shunsui asks.

“No,” Ulquiorra replies. He wants to wake up, he knows, because he doesn’t want to hear a Shinigami gloat, even if he understands how deep the betrayal runs.

“He’s not much of a god, if he lost,” Shunsui keeps going anyways.

“You didn’t win.”

“We defeated him.”

“He is alive.” He is still in Ulquiorra’s mind.

“But he didn’t succeed, did he?”

“There is no one at his level. It is why you couldn’t kill him. You will always have to fight your enemies.”

“Does having his battles fought by proxy distance him enough from having enemies?”

Ulquiorra doesn’t answer.

Then he is somewhere else, in Las Noches, on the balcony of his tower. Orihime is kneeling beside him, wrapping her arms around her knees. She looks at him with an indiscernible smile. Hueco Mundo didn’t rob her of her child’s face, but her child’s soul is another story.

“I’m glad you’re alive,” Orihime whispers after a little while, faint over the wind and the distant, violent dust storms. She turns her face into her arms. Large globs of tears splatter onto the roof, the only rain Hueco Mundo has ever seen. The dry stone sucks it up greedily, as it once did her blood.

“Sometimes I think about what happened here. About what you did, how horrible it was, and how you meant all of it. I should forget, and I should be stronger. I get mad at the arrancar. But then I think about how all hollows used to be human. I don’t want to have those bad feelings towards other people because something bad must have happened to all of you a long time ago. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for someone becoming a hollow. You all seem in so much pain.”

People, she says. Ulquiorra isn’t a person. He doesn’t know what he is.

“So I’m glad you’re alive, Ulquiorra. It must be for a good thing.”

“I killed Ichigo,” Ulquiorra says. “Do you forgive me for it?”

Orihime rubs at both her eyes with her small, scrunched up hands. “I forgive you.”

He despises humanity. In an attempt to explain something that should not exist in tandem with lofty concepts such as hope, love, joy, it attributes its own creations onto that which can’t possibly adhere to the same standards. Ulquiorra is a testament to evil. Yet he must suffer through the motions of being given reasons for his actions, as though he cannot simply _be._ He cannot be left alone in his cruelty. Everything he does must mean something to a human.

In reality, nothing differentiates him from a snake, a weed, or a patch of maggots. But because he doesn’t look like any of these repulsive things, he is somehow meant to be accepting of forgiveness and morality. But it was nothing personal. It had been his order.

If he had a heart, it would be full of nothing but decay and inevitability. What was the nature of the heart he had to learn, then? To understand why a little girl would stand before a monster, soaked to the elbow in the blood of her friends, and say she was not afraid? It says nothing for the heart but that it is treasonous to life and betrays wisdom.

Then to have the audacity to try and forgive all of it…

When he looks down at himself, his tattered clothing, the once solid block of his tattoo is faded and flaking away, becoming flecks of ash between his scraping fingernail.

Ulquiorra wakes with a start, breaking his fall back into reality. He has work to do.

Szayel had crept in while he redressed, now watching him tighten his boots. “How do you expect to kill Uryuu when you practically took yourself out for him the last time?” Szayel asks.

“There are many ways to kill someone.”

Szayel shrugs. “If you succeed. I shall wait by the window and wave my handkerchief, hoping ardently for your swift return.”

He pauses at the last boot strap. “Do you dream?”

Szayel is quiet for a long few seconds. “Sometimes.”

“What of?”

“You don’t have clearance for that type of information, Cifer. Why are you asking me this?”

Ulquiorra finishes with his boots and shrugs on a long overcoat. “I want to know why we dream.”

“Are you troubled by yours?”

He doesn’t answer.

Szayel sighs out through his nose and strokes a hand through his hair, then smooths it down. “No one can say. Some argue that dreams help us cope with reality. We work through our problems and potential consequences if we take certain courses of action in a way that we are protected from, outside of reality. We better comprehend the things we learn.”

“It seems we learn without problem, even if we don’t sleep for months.”

“Oh, maybe Grimmjow would benefit from a nap. He can fight in his sleep. I wonder if his arms and legs would flail around like a dog dreaming of a hunt.” Szayel laughs. “I suppose we retain the humans we are made in the image of, useful or not.”

Made? Ulquiorra was not made by a hōgyoku.

_You make yourself,_ Murciélago whispers.

He emerged from the quartz forest, as he is now.

_You laid yourself down in it. Then you arose. Do you think becoming ends there?_

* * *

If Hueco Mundo and the ruins were the badlands, Las Noches was atrophied armageddon. There is nothing left standing except for mismatched architecture, looking like it’d all been carelessly dropped on top of another city. Though it all smells of blood and fire, it is somehow simultaneously muted and damp like in a dust storm. Or a blizzard. Ice hangs off every corner of every building, but there is no snow.

Only icy preservation.

Ulquiorra waits for hours upon days in the frosty silence by the throne room where Uryuu had first made himself known, a reiatsu dampening cloak wrapped tight around him, until eventually an acrid trail of Quincy reiatsu raises his head out of a stupor. There are two of them, and one is Ishida Uryuu, walking alongside each other towards the north of the city.

He follows at a distance from above, taking short hops between the debris. He knows to keep to a walk when he can, knows that the eye is drawn to any movement even if he is difficult to spot against the terrain. As they approach the northern wall, a huge icy spire emerges from behind the hazy horizon. A complex of new buildings surround it, all coated with a glossy frozen sheen. The twisted tower pulsates with a dense energy that puts a black hole into the pit of Ulquiorra’s stomach.

When Uryuu and the other Quincy part ways after a short conversation, Ulquiorra tracks him through the Quincy camp and into the tower. He waits a minute to enter after Uryuu, and then hides around the door a few more seconds in case anyone had seen him enter, but he can sense only a handful of them scattered around.

Uryuu’s reiatsu comes to rest at the very top of the tower, at the end of a staircase that seems to spiral forever up into the heavens. Ulquiorra supposes there is nothing left to do but simply walk in through the door at the top of the stairs. He raps his knuckles against it twice.

“Come in,” from inside, so Ulquiorra does. The room is a stark white bedroom and office. So the Quincy must be making themselves rather comfortable in Las Noches.

“What is it?” Uryuu finally turns to face the door, and all at once his face turns pale and ashen. “How did you get in here!?”

“How do you think?” Ulquiorra advances towards the boy.

“What, are you trying to- to assassinate me?” He rapidly glances Ulquiorra up and down. Looking for a weapon, maybe, but Ulquiorra needs only his bare hands. “Don’t you want to know why the Quincy are here, at least!?”

“No,” Ulquiorra replies without hesitation. Truth be told, he doesn’t care. The other Espada may want to interrogate and postulate, but Ulquiorra recognizes action and outcome. There is a threat, no matter its intention.

Uryuu fumbles backwards over a sofa, tripping over the armrest falling onto his elbows. “Wait, wait, wait,” he babbles, raising his hand to Ulquiorra like it would protect him. It would sooner roll across the floor a second time. “I have something for you. It’s something of yours!”

Ulquiorra pauses in front of him, narrowing his eyes.

“It’s in the desk,” Uryuu gestures to the other side of the room, and starts to make his way there, but Ulquiorra grabs him by the collar and wrenches the boy over. Caution is what allows satisfaction to resurrect the curious.

Uryuu retrieves a small wooden box from a drawer, long but not very wide and lacquered dark brown, and puts it on the desk. “Open it,” he prompts. Ulquiorra sets the lid aside. His broken zanpakutō rests on top of a black velvet lining. Ulquiorra lets the Quincy go to run his fingers up her fragmented blade, the singed fibres of fabric at the hilt, the roughness of each folded steel layer at her fracture point.

“It’ll reform, right?” Uryuu asks. “Like the Shinigami’s do?”

“No,” Ulquiorra replies. The blade is empty, and Murciélago lives in his cursed right hand. But it will make Ulquiorra’s body feel more whole and familiar to wear her as he’s always done.

“Well, I don’t want it anyways.”

“It’s your war trophy.”

Uryuu shrugs. “I picked it up after you… ah. Well.” He pushes his glasses up his nose. Like Szayel. “I picked it up and thought it was rather neat. But it makes me feel ill even just sitting there.”

“Get me out of here undetected and I’ll consider our debts paid,” Ulquiorra says, wrapping Murciélago in the velvet cloth and stashing her in his pocket.

Uryuu slumps in relief. “This way.” He leads Ulquiorra to a manhole connected to the same caverns beneath Szayel’s laboratory, heaving the steel lid off with all the strength of an anemic.

Ulquiorra hesitates at the edge of the manhole, already both feet caught in the ladder rungs. He could turn around and slash Uryuu in half before he leaves, no matter what he said. Nothing holds value in the sands, least of all honour or promises.

But Ulquiorra clambers down the ladder and watches Uryuu push the cover back over him. He emerges in the centre of the ruins and makes haste to convene with Harribel. It was easy for him to fall back into this type of pattern — listen, do, report — but he doesn’t know why it no longer leaves him with a sense of satisfaction. For what purpose, besides his own impulse, does he do anything? Does there need to be anything else to comply with?

As he zigzags through the tight crumbling alleyways, the desert explodes with a shrieking alarm, coming from every side of the ruins. In the same moment, he picks up on four presences blocking the front and back of the alley, and one on the rooftops.

An arm slips beneath Ulquiorra’s jaw. He’s fast enough to bite down on the hand that comes up to cup his mouth and slam his head back until he feels and hears something crunch. But they are stubborn and strong, and don’t let go when the one on the roof lands in front of him. He uses that solid weight and the grip around his throat to kick his leg up.

One, two, three hits, but his ankle is caught on the fourth like he’s made of nothing more than bird bones. He reaches back and up and tries to jam his claws into the first assailant’s eyes. Though he doesn’t think he lands, the grip weakens and falls away, but so does Ulquiorra as his upper body smacks onto the ground, still held by his ankle.

A third joins to deliver a flurry of punches to his exposed abdomen and chest, protected only by his crossed arms. His other leg comes up with a sharp knee, knocking the smaller figure off him. Using the hold around his ankle, he hauls himself up off the ground with sonído, his free foot finding friction in the air, and then on the flat of the assailant’s face. Well, now flat. Featureless and oozing red from every shattered bone, splashing red so dark it was black onto their white uniform.

The third that Ulquiorra kicked off is standing to shake the fight back into themself but with a grotesquely dislocated shoulder. The fourth and fifth are approaching quickly from the front of the alley. This moment — he can see it so clearly, so slowly as it flows into itself.

He reaches into his cloak and brandishes broken Murciélago. One of the approaching assailants was not fast enough to see this. When their elbow strike is caught on Murciélago’s blade, she wafts through their arm like smoke rising in the air and on to cleave their head from their neck. The second of the two is eviscerated from hip to collar. Ulquiorra whips around on one foot to plunge her blade into the heart of the last attacker.

She tastes blood again. It is enough to feel whole, even if the pieces of her are strewn around Las Noches and on Ulquiorra.

As he approaches the main hall, Nelliel runs out to him in a frenzy, holding her zanpakutó in one hand.

“Did you get attacked as well?” She asks in between heavy breaths. 

He pulls at the smattering of blood on his clothing for demonstration.

“They’ve taken Harribel.”

“What do you mean?”

“By the time I got here, I could just see her in chains, looking so weak. Some kind of special restraints. Even in resurrección, they could take her!”

“The Quincy?”

“Some of them arrancar.”

Szayel emerges from the hall as well, looking no worse for wear. “Yoo-hoo,” he calls breezily.

“Enjoyed your spa visit?” Nelliel snaps at him.

“Undearest Nel, a caja negación is certainly no spa! But it surely is lucky for me that I pilfered the caja tablets from Cifer’s room, isn’t it? Who knows what those brutes would have done to me.”

“Only what you deserve.”

“Such poisonous words! Don’t you owe me a bit of gratitude for the sensors?”

“They didn’t do much but hurt your ears in addition to being attacked.”

He shrugs. “I promised and delivered an alarm.”

Nelliel stares ahead, unwavering but weary. “It’s clear this is becoming a much bigger issue than I think we wanted to contend with. But this has crossed a line into war. I think we should be prepared to find a way to speak with the Quincy, find out what they want, and try to come to a peaceful resolution.”

“You’re kidding,” Szayel sneers. “What exactly would you be willing to give them? A lovely plot of Hueco Mundo for them to call their own?”

“If that’s what they want.”

“Do you know what Quincy are, or have you been sleepwalking this entire time? The express _purpose_ of Quincy is to eliminate hollow. They’re not going to roll over onto their backs and accept concessions just because you asked so prettily. And what — you’ll berate them gently if they continue massacring us?”

“I have more faith in people than to think they’re prone to nothing but violence.”

“My God, you’re emptier between the ears than I thought!” Szayel throws his hands into the air. “That’s the problem. They’re people! Have you even no basic understanding of human history? The connecting factor in all of it is violence! We are the consequences of it!”

“How are you going to stop me?” Nelliel takes an antagonizing step closer to Szayel. “What are you going to do, Aporro? Kill me again?”

He inhales sharply. “If you ever —“

“I’m going to rescue Harribel,” she says resolutely. “And then I’m going to find a way to live with the Quincy. As far as I’m concerned about you… I’m not. You belong to Seireitei.”

Her posture is tight, a puffed up animal defending its territory. That’s exactly what Szayel meant. He, Ulquiorra, Nelliel, they’re animals. The chains tethering them to humanity have been so thoroughly severed from their hearts.

“You’re making a mistake,” Ulquiorra says.

“You don’t have to take his side.”

His eyes narrow. “The truth doesn’t have a side.”

“Feeling chatty?” Nel shifts her glare upon him. “Spare me. If I’m wrong, you can point and laugh at my corpse. But there is nothing in this world that isn’t worth trying.”

“Nelliel,” the words leave Szayel like he’s grinding them between his teeth. “I am attempting to reason with you. You have nothing to prove by doing this. I know you have this _complex…”_

“Oh, I’m the one with the complex —”

“But you can let this one go.” Szayel’s hands scrunch in the air like he’s both trying to shake good judgement into her and strangle her. “You’ve always thought yourself a fixer, but there comes a time to accept that some things are better left to however they might fester.”

“You lost me there. Are you still talking about this conflict, or yourself?” She looks Szayel up and down scathingly, her chin held high. “I feel like for the first time, I have your life in my hands, rather than the other way around. I’m going to do what I think is right, and I will graciously accept a visit from you when I accomplish it.”

When she ambles away without another word, limping on one foot, Szayel releases a withering breath.

“She makes me wish I’d been smothered in my cot as an infant,” he says witheringly. Turning to Ulquiorra, “I have to get back to Seireitei. It’s been long enough, and this… situation has taken an interesting turn.”

“I’ll take you through the garganta,” Ulquiorra says.

“Oh, my valiant knight, full of chivalry and romanticism! Shall we walk arm in arm?”

Ulquiorra ignores him to unzip this dimension, stepping into the cloying void.

“I was thinking. That boy, Ichigo,” Szayel’s voice echoes through the garganta’s caves. “He came away entirely different. Not much of a boy anymore, really.”

Ulquiorra squeezes past a sharp stalagmite. “So?”

“Don’t take any offence… or do, for all I care, but you should have disposed of him easily.”

“He overpowered me.” Ulquiorra stops to stare through Szayel. “That is how battles are won.”

He sighs, exasperated. “The boy is in a coma, partly from what you did to him, and you mean to tell me it wasn’t enough.”

“Yes.”

“There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“About what?" Ulquiorra deflects. Szayel isn’t getting the hint and looks like he’s going to start foaming at the mouth if he doesn’t get what he wants in the next breath.

“Your resurrección! Your _second_ resurrección! Orihime Inoue and that stupid fucking Quincy told the Twelfth Division all about it!” In his anger, he grabs Ulquiorra and pins him to the gritty wall. “You could have prevented everything if you told me! It all ended the way it did, and now we’re stuck in this mess! Do you have any idea what Mayuri did to me? Do you know what it’s like to have every inch of skin on you peeled off one part at a time? I was forced to use Gabriel so many times I lost count. I never knew it could feel like I was clawing through the centre of the sun, but it _did_ after the twentieth time.”

This doesn’t impress Ulquiorra. He gave and lost things, too. He came out of it mangled and redundant, forced to bear witness to his defeat and its consequences instead of letting himself succumb to death.

“You think I didn’t consider it?” Ulquiorra says. He holds Szayel’s stormy gaze, bubbling molten gold. “Accept this fact: some of the Espada could barely stand against Shinigami who were not even lieutenants. If they could achieve a second resurrección without ripping themselves apart, they would die against a Captain. I fail to see how it would be better. Or do you see more value in living in the past? It does nothing for you every time you go back to Seireitei and they put your shackles on again. Pull yourself together. Hold a grudge if you must. Just don’t waste my time doing it.”

Szayel’s grip on Ulquiorra’s shoulders tightens and loosens rhythmically. He grinds his teeth together and speaks softly, “Mayuri still took Fornicarás in the end. He took more of me than I knew I had.”

“Then why are you helping the Shinigami?” Ulquiorra asks, but he thinks he knows the answer already. It’s like the answer to his own dilemma: why did he try so hard to live? Because there is yet something to do.

Szayel’s arms drop in defeat. “There is no other way to live.”

“Then die.”

“I can’t.” He slumps to the ground like the reishi forces him down, drooping his head. “I always wanted to die. I wanted it so much I could taste it. But there’s no joy in it anymore. I live to spite the pain, but there is pain in both life and death.” He pulls his knees closer to himself. “Where does it end? Nothing I do is right.”

Ulquiorra doesn’t speak for a while. Szayel scrunches his hands in his hair helplessly. “It’s not wrong either,” Ulquiorra finally says. “If you don’t know what happens in the end, you don’t know if what you do is right or wrong. It’s just what you did. I thought I could protect Las Noches, but I didn’t know it was a fool’s errand.”

“Just go,” Szayel mutters.

Fine. He deserves whatever prison awaits him, if this is something he’s willing to throw his life away for. In reality, Szayel’s freedom was always artificial, dreamed up by him and him alone. But Ulquiorra knows he will always belong to one power or another.

Ulquiorra pulls the garganta open to Hueco Mundo. One step from leaving, he pauses and looks over his shoulder at Szayel’s snivelling figure. “If the heart is real, I think that I cannot learn it. It must not be something, but the origin of things. In this way, everything itself cannot be understood.”

He steps out onto the roof of his tower in the ruins.

The first thing that comes to mind is torrents of blood, past and future. Was it true, what he said to Szayel? That he has learned anything at all?

The problem is that Ulquiorra is nothing more than a weapon. A bludgeoning tool that will not only clean itself off after the bloody deed, but the scene as well. Aizen was the only one who understood this.

It’s difficult for him to reconcile between sentience, occupying his body to the fullest degree, and simultaneously estranged from the possession of it. Despite being the only one here, within himself, he is a mere observer. There used to be strings attached to his swinging sword, but even without them he still does it.

But when he thinks of his blood, all murky and still fresh in the lines and cracks of his hands, he finds it’s a wound he doesn’t want to reopen. Ulquiorra doesn’t know why he’s still alive. He doesn’t know why he still wants to be alive. He used to be something closed and drawn. Now he feels like his bones have opened to let his body swallow the sky ocean.

Ulquiorra looks out at the vastness of the desert. There is nothing, for leagues upon leagues of sand. He was born twice into the nothingness, and so to nothingness he should return. Should.

There is nothing… but just as much there is something to be created within it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading.


End file.
